Marriage
Marriage
Islamic Marriage . Scholars who study the evolution of Muslim marriage practices between 622 and 1500 are still debating if the rise of Islam signaled new practices in the institution of marriage; to what extent the message brought by the Prophet Muhammad introduced new ideas that shaped Muslim marital life over the following centuries; and whether Islamic marriage gave women more rights and power than they had in the pre-Islamic period. The Qur’an, which records the word of God as revealed to Muhammad, praises the institution of marriage as natural and desirable for all Muslims, saying that God “created for you mates from yourselves that you might find rest in them, and ordained between you love and mercy” (30: 21). Men are enjoined to treat their wives with kindness and to provide them with support and protection. In return, women are expected to obey their husbands. Although these Qur’anic verses call for marriage to be a loving and supportive relationship, it is a relationship of complementarity rather than complete equality between husband and wife. The husband also has more leeway than his wife when it comes to divorce. He can divorce his wife at will, although the Qur’an does expect him to fulfill certain obligations to her and his children.
Pre-Islamic Marriage . Scholars have taken three distinct positions on whether the stipulations made in the Qur’an represent a departure from pre-Islamic practice and whether the Muslim marriage described by the Qur’an was more or less favorable to women than unions in pre-Islamic Arab society. First, some scholars argue that pre-Islamic marriage in the Arabian peninsula accorded women considerable power. They point to evidence that some women freely chose their marriage partners and brought their husbands to live with them and their families (a matrilocal marriage arrangement). In addition, the offspring of these women were considered part of the woman’s family or clan, not her husband’s, and the line of descent was reckoned through the mother, or matrilineally. Finally, a woman could divorce her husband at will, simply by turning her tent around so that the entrance was no longer where her husband expected it to be when he returned home. According to this view the patrilocal and patrilineal Muslim marriage represented a real reversal for women. Other scholars, however, assert that Islam ushered in a set of positive changes and even revolutionary progress for women in marriage. They stress that in pre-Islamic Arabia, divorce was easy and casual for men as well. They could enter and leave a marriage at will without incurring any obligations. In this view the Qur’an—by outlining the obligations of the husband for the support of his wife and children and by detailing the responsibilities of the husband to his wife in the wake of divorce— introduced regulation of the marital relationship in ways that brought new security to women. Furthermore, although the Qur’an accepted the practice of polygyny, the right of a man to be married to more than one woman at a time, it was strictly regulated. The Qur’an limited the number of legal wives to four and exhorted a man to marry only one if he could not treat multiple wives with fairness (4: 2-3). Thus, in this second view, Islam brought order and security to an institution that had been plagued by arbitrary practices. A third view tends to focus on the extent to which Islamic marriage exhibits continuity with prior practices in the Middle East. These scholars point out that Islamic marriage as discussed in the Qur’an represents a blend of pre-existing social practices. The diverse marriage practices of the pre-Islamic nomadic peoples of the Arabian peninsula, which included the possibility of polygamy for both men and women as well as several forms of marriage and divorce, was one set of traditions that contributed to the Islamic tradition. But the settled pre-existing urban cultures of the region (such as the Sasanians and the Byzantines), which tended to subordinate the wife to the husband and severely restricted her ability to choose her own husband or leave a marriage, also contributed to the cultural mix. The Qur’an drew on both traditions and tempered the blend with a stress on ethical and compassionate behavior.
The Prophet’s Marriages . The Qur’an was not the only source of guidance on marriage for early Muslims. They also looked to the example set by the Prophet Muhammad, whose life was studied carefully and deemed worthy of emulation. Muhammad married several women during his lifetime, but two of his marriages have received the most attention. His first marriage, to Khadijah, on which he entered when he was still a young man, proved central to his spiritual mission. Khadijah was a wealthy widow and businesswoman who had considerable trading interests. Fifteen years Muhammad’s senior, she had first hired him to work for her and later proposed marriage to him. By all accounts, their relationship was close and supportive. Her wealth allowed him to pursue his spiritual path, and she not only provided material support but was the first to believe in the authenticity of the revelations he received from God. Therefore, she was the first convert to Islam. As long as she lived, Muhammad took no other wife, and after her death he mourned and revered her throughout the rest of his life. Once Khadijah was gone, however, Muhammad married several women. The most prominent and beloved of these wives was ‘A’isha. The daughter of Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad’s closest supporters, ‘A’isha was married to the Prophet when she was nine years old and was his companion and confidante until he died nine years later. Islamic texts highlight the level of intimacy between them: Muhammad washed from the same vessel as ‘Aisha; he
prayed and received revelations in her presence; and when he realized he was mortally ill, he chose to die in her arms. Her close relationship with Muhammad made her a special source of information on his life. She had witnessed his actions and heard his opinions on many topics, and thus she became an authoritative voice in the transmission of hadiths, the accounts of what the Prophet said and did during his lifetime that came to serve as guides for the actions and beliefs of later communities of Muslims. It is thanks to ‘A’isha, for example, that Muslims know the Prophet helped with the housework and even shared a toothbrush with her. These accounts of Muhammad as a loving husband with a gift for intimacy do not seem to accord well with the historical fact that Muhammad married several different women and, after the death of Khadijah, routinely practiced polygyny. Admittedly, many of his marriages were made to cement political alliances and in some cases to provide support and protection for widows. Furthermore, he always stressed the need to treat all wives equally and with fairness, and—later commentators added— not all his marital practices were necessarily meant to be followed by Muslims in general. That is, the Prophet and his wives were special people whose example was not to be followed exactly in every matter.
Islamic Marriage Law . The task of melding Qur’anic material and the example of the Prophet to develop and interpret Islamic rules applicable to all Muslim marriages took place largely in a legal context. Medieval Muslim jurists, who came from the ranks of the ulama’, spent considerable time and energy on the project of defining Islamic marriage as they elaborated the shari’ah (the corpus of Islamic law). Working with the Qur’an and the hadiths, they shaped the laws regulating Islamic marriage. Distinct legal schools, with differing rules for marriages and divorce, emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries and then continued to undergo a process of development and refinement. All these schools viewed Islamic marriage as a contract between the bride and groom entailing specific rights and obligations that differed for the man and the woman. Both parties had to agree to the contract, and the groom paid the bride a specified dower (mahr), which became her personal property. Once the marriage was consummated, the husband was responsible for the material support of his wife, and in return she was expected to give him her obedience. He could restrict her freedom of movement by forbidding her to leave his house, for example, but he was expected to treat her fairly and kindly. A husband did not have any rights to the control of his wife’s property, however. Everything she brought to the marriage and any property she earned or was given were hers to enjoy and dispose of as she wished. While Islamic law permitted a man to have as many as four wives (as well as an unlimited number of slave concubines), women were required to practice monogamy.
Divorce Law . A man could divorce his wife without citing grounds, although he did incur a number of legal obligations in the wake of divorce: he was required to pay any balance of the dower and any other debts he owed his wife; he was required to support her during a “waiting period” of three months or, should she be pregnant, until she delivered the child; and he was completely responsible for the material support of all children born of the marriage. The ulama’ ruled that a wife, however, could obtain a divorce from an Islamic judge only if she could demonstrate that the marriage was defective in some way. The legal schools differed in what they considered valid reasons for a woman to demand a divorce, but they were generally quite restrictive, ranging from a husband’s impotence or fatal communicable disease to his desertion or nonsupport. If she could not prove such a defect in the marriage, a woman could try to obtain a khul’ divorce, a female-initiated action in which the woman obtained a divorce from her husband in return for forgoing the balance of her dower, giving up her rights to support during her waiting period, and perhaps taking on responsibility for child support as well.
DIVORCE RECORDS
Though a man was permitted to divorce a wife without bringing the case before a judge, divorced couples sometimes appeared in court to make a formal declaration of the end of their marriage and the fulfillment of all related obligations. The following declaration was made in a Jerusalem court in 1304:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. She acknowledged—Fatima daughter of ‘Abd-Allah son of Muhammad, the Hebronite, who is present in Jerusalem—in conformity with the shari’a, while she was in a sound body and mind and legally capable of conducting her affairs, that she has no claim on her divorcer, the Shakyh, the Imam, the Unique and Perfect Scholar, Burhan al-Din Ibrahim son of the late Zayn al-Din Allah, al-Nasiri, one of the Sufis of the khanqah of al-Salahiyya in Jerusalem, may God the Most High strengthen him; [she claims] no right or any remainder of a right, nor a bride price or any remainder of a bride price, no [expense of] clothing or maintenance, and no alimony, and absolutely nothing from the matrimonial rights in the past and up to its [the document’s] date. [She acknowledged] that she received from him her fixed share allotted to her child by him for a period of three months and a half, in conformity with the legal payment. In regard to this she was born witness to, on the fourth of Shawwal al-Mubarak of the year seven hundred and eighty two. Praise be to God, Lord of the two worlds.…
Source: Huda Lutft, “A Study of Six Fourteenth Century Iqrars from al-Quds Relating to Muslim Women,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, 26 (October 1983): 259.
Interpretation and Practice . The legal rules for marriage evolved as a process of juristic interpretation of Islamic texts in connection with actual legal practice. Islamic courts were established at a local level, and individuals brought their claims and questions about marriage to the Islamic judge for rulings. Islamic jurists with reputations for great learning and wisdom became muftis, people who were qual ified to give legal opinions outside the court to anyone who asked. Although there are few surviving Islamic court records from before the sixteenth century, there are many extant collections of legal opinions issued by prominent muftis. These opinions reveal the extent to which individual Muslims participated in the process of fashioning the law by bringing their questions about marriage to the attention of jurists. For example, the basic concept that a husband owes his wife material support during their marriage called for clarification and elaboration. Over the years, in response to questions brought to the muftis and the courts, the jurists came to define such support in great detail: a man must support his wife in the manner to which she is accustomed and in keeping with the lifestyle of her social class in her specific environment. That is, a woman from a comfortable family could insist on a house servant or perhaps daily servings of meat. It was laymen and -women, seeking detailed guidance, who pressed the jurists to continue elaborating and interpreting the law in the context of changing societies. Yet, because of the lack of extensive records for the medieval period, it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the legal rules for marriage were actually observed. Still, there are some indications that the laws on marriage were taken seriously. In fourteenth-century Jerusalem, for example, a husband and wife might come to court after a divorce to register their divorce settlement. The former wife would testify that she had received her rights: the balance of her dower, the costs of her waiting period, any debts her husband owed her, and child support. The registration of such a settlement (not required under law) suggests that the couple, and in particular the former husband, were trying to avoid future legal action over divorce obligations and were establishing an official record to prove that all such obligations had been discharged. Clearly they expected the Islamic rules of divorce to be enforced in their community. Although there are no statistics on overall divorce rates during this period, the ease of divorce—and the absence of any discernable stigma attached to the practice—probably resulted in a perception of marriage as an impermanent institution and high rates of divorce. Women as well as men were likely to have serial marriages: women of the Mamluk elite in thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Egypt often made several marriages over their lifetimes. For example, Khadijah, the daughter of the Mamluk prince Hajji ibn al-Baisari, married six different men in the course of her marital career.
Courtly Marriages . Islamic religious texts and the laws derived from them were not the only forces that shaped the institution of marriage in the medieval period. Particularly in elite circles, other cultural influences came into play. Historians have noted that the respect enjoyed by the wives of Muhammad and his contemporaries in the early Islamic period seem to have persisted into the days of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750). ‘Attika, the wife of the Umayyad ruler ‘Abd al-Malik (ruled 685–705), was well known for her wealth and beneficence, and many sought her intercession with her husband. Umm al-Banin, the wife of al-Walid I (ruled 705–715), was known to summon and scold officials on her own.
Concubines . By the time of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, however, it had become common practice for rulers to keep large harems of secluded women, in which legal wives of free origin were vastly outnumbered by slave concubines. Slave concubinage predated Islam and came to be regulated by Islamic law. According to the law, men were permitted to have sexual access to any female slave they owned. As the Arab empire expanded under the Umayyads and early Abbasids, newly conquered territories were the source of large numbers of slaves, many of whom became the personal property of the ruler and his top officials. After the initial conquest of a region, the conquerors continued to procure slaves through trade with neighboring lands. Slave women, many of whom were educated and trained in various social graces, became a standard feature of elite harems, where they often displaced legal wives. As concubines, they did not enjoy the legal privileges of free wives. They could be bought and sold at will, and they had no rights to marital support. Only in the event that a concubine bore a child to her master did she acquire some limited rights: she could not be sold; she would be freed on the death of her master (according to some, she became free on the birth of the child); and her child was the free and legitimate heir of his father. A few concubines were able to function more or less as legal wives if they gained their master’s support and affection. Khayzuran, the concubine of the Abbasid ruler al-Mahdi (ruled 775–785), managed to become his legal wife and the mother of two of his successors as khalifah, playing an active role in the making of state policy. In general, the rise of slave concubinage as a common practice tended to depress the status of wives. All the women of the elite came to be confined to the quarters of the harem, and the boundaries between free wife and concubine were blurred.
Powerful Women . With the arrival and eventual takeover of power by Turks and Mongols in the thirteenth century, the marriage practices of the elite underwent some modification. The power and influence of wives in the states established by Turks and Mongols suggest that the nomadic cultural traditions of these groups accorded women considerable power within a marriage. In the Ilkhanid state, established by the Mongols after the capture of Baghdad and downfall of the Abbasids in 1258, royal wives participated in the highest Mongol council, the Kuriltay, and were thus part of the power structure. In the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, the power and involvement of the wife of the ruler came to a climax in the reign of al-Malik al-Salih, Najm al-Din, who died in 1249 while fighting against the Crusaders. His wife, Shajarat al-Durr, concealed his death for three months and then had herself proclaimed sultana and ruled first in the name of a child-prince and then in consort with the leader of the Mamluk soldiers, who founded a new dynasty. In the context of these elites, marriage was a political project, one of the most important bonds that undergirded elite loyalties and power struggles. Although historians know quite a bit about elite
marriage thanks to the availability of chronicles and biographies of the period, they know far less about marriage for ordinary people. Elaborate harem quarters housing multiple wives and slave concubines were far too expensive for most of the population.
Common Folk . No doubt the majority of the urban poor and the peasantry in the countryside could not afford to imitate the marriage practices of the wealthy and powerful. Scholars lack the historical materials, however, to ascertain the extent to which the bulk of the population adhered to Islamic regulations on marriage and divorce. An occasional glimpse of life at the more mundane level may be found in fragmentary records from Islamic courts. In fourteenth-century Jerusalem, for example, a widow of average means acknowledged to the court that she had received her due from her late husband’s estate. The debts the estate owed her included the remainder of her bridal gift and a sum of money for her clothing, as well as her share as one of the heirs in his estate. Even the presence of such a document suggests that the local community took these marital claims seriously. In the wake of a husband’s death, his widow’s rights to her dower and other marital debts took precedence over all other claims on the estate.
Love in Marriage . Emotional ties are difficult to document. Even among the literate intellectual Muslim elite, there was a certain reticence when it came to displaying feelings about one’s wife or husband. One striking exception was Sultan Sulayman (born 1494), who ruled the Ottoman Empire in 1520–1566 and who wrote passionate love poetry to his concubine turned wife, Hurrem Sultan. An example of a middle-class merchant’s devotion to his wife is revealed in an anecdote from tenth-century Baghdad recorded by al-Hamadhani in his Maqamat. The passage also describes the common practice of cousin marriage:
While I was in Baghdad a merchant invited me to partake of madirah [a meat dish] and he clung to me with the clinging of a pressing creditor … till I accepted his invitation to it, so we started. Now the whole way he was praising his wife and ready to sacrifice his heart’s blood for her, eulogizing her cleverness in her art, and her excellent taste in cooking, saying, “Sir, if you were to see her with the apron tied round her waist, going about the rooms, from the oven to the cooking pots, and from the cooking pots to the oven, blowing the fire with her mouth, pounding the spices with her hands; and if you were to see the smoke discoloring that beautiful face and affecting that smooth cheek, thou wouldst behold a spectacle at which eyes would be dazed. I love her because she loves me, and it is a mark of a man’s good fortune that he should be given a lawful helpmeet and that he should be aided by his spouse, and especially when she is of his own clay. In near relationship she is my paternal uncle’s daughter, her clay is my clay, her town is my town, her paternal uncles are my paternal uncles and her origin is my origin. But in disposition she is more generous than I am, and in form more beautiful.”
Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth-century historian whose theories on the rise and decline of civilization still seem relevant, experienced the loss of his wife and daughters in a shipwreck as they were en route to join him in Cairo. Observers noted that this tragedy transformed him, and he was irascible and distant to the end of his days some twenty-two years later. The meaning and practice of marriage varied greatly across class and community. Although it is possible to discern an Islamic vision of marriage, it was a vision with variations, and it had the flexibility to accommodate practices ranging from vast royal harems to monogamous relationships with precisely defined rights and obligations.
Sources
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